Sig Christenson: A walk with Michael Kelly

It reported that Washington Post columnist and Atlantic Monthly editor-at-large Michael Kelly was killed in Iraq five years ago last Friday, the first American journalist to fall in the war.

He died just up the road from our armored column outside Baghdad. His truck, a soft-skinned Humvee, flipped into a filthy drainage ditch. Sgt. Wilbert Davis, the driver, was killed as well and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

They were trapped under water for 45 minutes. Efforts to revive them failed and the word spread: the battalion’s newspaper reporter had died. Some who heard that rumor thought that I was the one who had been killed.

I was actually asleep. Then-Maj. Michael Johnson of the 3rd Infantry Division’s 3-69 battalion awoke me as I dozed on the hood of my Humvee to tell me the news. It was about 2:30 a.m., and I was exhausted after covering nearly three days of non-stop fighting through the Karbala gap.

“Michael Kelly died tonight,” he said.

I went numb.

Years later, I’ve learned that our column was supposed to advance into Saddam International Airport that night but stopped after Davis and Kelly went into the ditch only a few vehicles away from us.

A UH-60 Black Hawk flew in to rush both men to a field hospital. The tactical radio was silent. Nobody knew why the column had stopped. I had no idea that Mike had perished only a short walk away from us.

“Nobody was saying anything,” said Dan Housley, then a senior airman I was embedded with during the war.

Then-Capt. Shad Magann, who commanded the close-air support teams we covered during the war, was so tired he fell asleep standing up.

I had gotten to know Michael Kelly in Kuwait City, before the invasion. It was before we even left the JW Marriott Hotel. We met during lunch at the hotel’s buffet and decided to take a walk. I figured we’d do a half hour or so.

Mike’s idea of a walk was 10 miles – round trip. Just what the doctor ordered for a pair of 46-year-old men.

This stroll came along the city’s spectacular waterfront. It began with us passing modern high-rise buildings interspersed with dingy storefronts and busy signs written in Arabic and English. Some of those buildings have paint peeling from the facades and clothes hanging on the balconies – a reflection of Kuwaiti family values.

Rich Kuwaitis, which is to mean virtually all Kuwaitis who are legal citizens rather than alien residents, are outnumbered by Third World nationals, many of them from Asia. These humble folk do the Kuwaitis’ dirty work, from cleaning the streets to catching the fish that are served each night at the city’s high end restaurants. They live five to an apartment in the capital city, splitting the bills and sending most of their earnings to their families back home.

The ones I met said they went home to see their wives and kids every couple of years.

Mike and I pass those buildings and the workers toiling within them, walk up the busy and, yes, very dangerous street, and turn right. All the while we keep an eye on curving intersections that have their own peculiar blind spots and drivers in flashy luxury cars who’ve never spent a moment dwelling on the concept of pedestrian safety. Ten minutes later we reach the waterfront, a sleek green stretch that looks a bit like Corpus Christi’s shoreline.

We turn right, passing the National Assembly, a grand white concrete structure that mixes traditional Arab styles with contemporary influences. This strikes me as important. America’s Capitol has Greco-Roman roots, and the symbolism is no accident. That culture is written into our Constitution and remains a living, breathing part of our national life centuries later. What does Kuwait’s architecture mean? And if this is about a democratic future that also tries to embrace long-treasured Islamic traditions, will other nearby countries be influenced by it?

Just across the street from the assembly, or Majlis al-Umma, is a junkyard full of children’s amusement park rides.

I feel at home. That could be my native Houston, a messy, vibrant city with no zoning laws to guide its growth.

Moments later we walk past dozens of wooden boats in the water, with yet others stuck in the mud. Most of them are abandoned, prompting Mike to wonder about the possibility of taking one home and fixing it with his kids.

This is not an idea his wife would approve of, he knows, but it’s a pleasant dream all the same.

Certainly a man’s dream, the stuff of middle age.

The walk soon moves into its most dangerous phase: the street crossing at the Emir’s guest palace. Pedestrians on our path must cross here because no one is allowed to walk next to the concrete and iron perimeter fence that seals the palace grounds. I’m thankful that Mike is my guide because he tells me that if we try to walk along the wide, smooth sidewalk on the palace side we’ll soon enough be met by an armed Kuwaiti security guard.

The palace itself is a sprawling compound that runs for blocks. It starts with a grand entrance that leads to a massive, multistory parking garage and continues with a series of long, beautiful buildings that are stylishly Arab.

There is grass here, one of the few places you’ll find it in Kuwait – and, we shall soon discover, in dusty Iraq as well – and with the lawn also comes a healthy grove of tall, green palm trees. The Kuwaiti monarch doesn’t actually live here, Mike advises, but it is the scene of occasional gatherings that are favored by Arabs in the region.

The steps we take turn into feet and then yards and miles. Finally, about an hour later, we reach the Sharq Market. This is a truly stunning place with a red brick boardwalk on the waterfront that wraps around the Sharq – which early in the war will be a target of an Iraqi missile attack. The Chinese-made Silkworm will hit a pier, not the giant fish market, grocery store and mall within walking distance of the wharves where men reel in the catch of the day.

Mike and I stop at a Subway, get soft drinks and talk. He’s shorter, with glasses, direct and soft spoken, the kind of guy who could slip into a room full of important people and not be noticed. He’d be in and out with his story and not a soul would ever be the wiser – until the paper hit the streets. We talk about our work, family lives, his book and, if memory serves me right, a little about what we think will happen in the weeks of war ahead of us. I quickly decide that Mike has led a charmed and happy life. I hear later that he’s had an interesting and colorful career as a journalist, once taking Iran-Contra scandal figure Fawn Hall to the White House Correspondent’s Dinner.

People I talk with at lunch the next day tell me that he is principled and honest. They also say he’s something of a wanderer, never really staying in the same job for that long, and so it is that I am not surprised to see him show up at dusk the night before the big battle of Karbala gap. Kelly, who is writing a book on the division’s role in the invasion, is assigned to the division headquarters. But it defies reason that he could stand it there for very long.

Fast forward to Iraq.

The sun sets, and we talk a few yards from the Humvee he will die in. It has a power inverter in it and I wonder about going with them. The inverter in my truck is broken and I have no way to recharge my laptop and satellite equipment, but I decide to stay put and ration the use of my gear. It isn’t like I have a bad feeling about going with Mike and Wilbert Davis, but I’ll soon discover it is the most important decision I have made – or may ever make.

No one knows what is coming next, except that Karbala is to be the decisive battle before we make the outskirts of Baghdad. From now on out we expect fierce resistance and, perhaps chemical attacks designed to stop us or at least slow us down. We’re in our chemical gear day and night, even asleep, our masks, gloves and boots within arm’s reach. The conversation comes easily between Mike, Housley and myself as darkness envelops our armored column. There are no funny feelings or dark premonitions, but this is the last time we’ll see Mike alive.

The clock is quickly running down on his life.

This moment of the war, like our walk on a sunny day before it all began, is never far from mind, as is a profound sense of sadness. It is one of those scenes so vivid I can still see it like a movie, right down to Housley suggesting a title for the book and the big smile forming on Kelly’s face.

“Call it, ‘Air Force TACPs kick butt,'” Housley said, referring to his team and other the Air Force close-air support crews that had been calling in the air strikes that decimated Iraq’s elite Republican Guard.

A few moments later we went separate ways. I caught a few hours’ sleep.

Weeks earlier, on the afternoon of March 11, Kelly had sat two seats ahead of me on a schoolbus that took us away from our cush hotels and to our embed assignments. It was a rainy, dreary end of the day shaken by occasional thunderclaps.

The bus drops off a paved road and the ride over desert sand gets rougher, the tan floor and sky almost becoming one. It is a long time on the road before then-Maj. Michael Birmingham, the division’s media chief, reveals our embeds slots and tension fills the air as he stands in the bus and runs through his list.

Would we be with units close to the action, or far to the rear?

The Boston Herald’s Jules Crittenden, at the front of the bus, talks with NBC’s David Bloom.

Tall, thin and the picture of perfect health, Bloom will die of a blood clot on April 6 – two days after Kelly.

“Do you think we’re on the geek bus, or the cool bus?” Crittenden asks, referring to our embed assignments.

“I think we’re on the cool bus,” Bloom replies, voice confident.

He was right. We all got front-row seats to the war. But before Saddam’s statute fell in Baghdad, the war seemingly won, we also were reminded of a truth that is never far from my mind: time is a dear friend, and a mortal enemy.